I poured her a drink, and we made peace.
Next day the corkscrew turned up in the pantry at the back of the napkin-drawer. Mrs Fiddle produced it in triumph. ‘Here it is, Sir. Now see if I wasn’t right about the initials.’
I took it gingerly from her, and there was the silver plate all right. I couldn’t understand how I had missed it. F.C.C.B. 1928, the silver slightly tarnished.
‘Yes, Sir, it could do with a nice rub-up.’
I saw no way out of this awkward situation but to earn credit as a practical joker. ‘The fact is,’ I blustered, ‘I bought it at Lowestoft as a present for Mr Fiddle. I didn’t intend you to see it, and that’s why I made a bit of a mystery of the whole affair. I meant to keep it for his birthday. First of next month, isn’t it?’
‘No, Sir. Fiddle’s birthday was the first of last month. Very kind of you, Sir, all the same, I’m sure.’
But she still seemed dissatisfied. ‘Fiddle isn’t a wine or spirit drinker, Sir,’ she explained after a pause, ‘and bottled beer comes with screw-tops these days.’
‘How very stupid of me! All right, let’s chuck it out of the window, after all.’
‘Oh, no, Sir! You might hurt someone passing in the street. Besides, it’s a nice article. Keep it for yourself, and give Fiddle a couple of bottles of stout, instead. He’d take that very kindly, though belated. And so would I, if it comes to that, Mr Massie, Sir.’
Late that evening I walked along the Mall with a neat package in my hand until I came to Hammersmith Bridge. When no one was about, I hurled it into mid-stream. What a load off my mind! But that night I dreamed that a nasty-looking corpse floating in the water had grabbed the parcel just as it sank and shouted to me to come back and collect my property. He rose dripping from the Thames; it was F.C.C. Borley himself. I turned and fled screaming towards the Broadway, but he came after me. ‘It’s yours, you damned thief!’ he bawled. ‘Wait! I’ve brought it!’ And then, as a parting shot, heard indistinctly through the rumble of traffic: ‘And the Worser Part (Bins K to T) for Mr Reginald Massie.’ That was the operative phrase in his will.
I awoke with chattering teeth, jumped out of bed, switched on all the lights in the flat, poured myself a stiff drink, and went along to see whether the corkscrew were back again on the pantry hook. Thank God, it wasn’t!
I re-packed my suitcase and read myself to sleep again.
In the morning when Mrs Fiddle brought my tea I told her that I had been rung up by another set of yachting friends in South Devon, and was catching the morning train there. I’d send her a wire to let her know when I was returning, and what to do with my letters. This was nothing unusual; I frequently leave home on a sudden impulse.
I booked for Brixham, where I knew that a regatta was in progress. Also, a bachelor-uncle of mine lived on the hill overlooking the harbour: an ex-Marine Colonel whom I had not seen for years and whose chief interest was British freshwater molluscs. We exchanged cards at Christmas and his were always superscribed: ‘Come and visit a lonely old man.’ I thought: ‘Here’s my chance to show a little family feeling; besides, all the pubs are sure to be full because of the regatta.’
Uncle Tim was delighted to see me and discuss his molluscs and his rheumatism. That evening he took me in a taxi to the Yacht Club for an early supper. ‘You look depressed, my boy,’ he said, ‘and not too well in spite of your holiday. You ought to get married. Man isn’t meant to live by himself. Marriage would tone you up and give you a motive in life.’ He added sadly: ‘I put it off too long. Molluscs and marriage don’t go together. Children would have played the deuce with my aquarium and cabinets.’
‘Oh, they grow up,’ I said airily. ‘Seven years’ patience, and your collection would have been safe enough.’
‘You may be right; but the poor little blighters couldn’t wait.’
‘Who? The children?’
‘No, no, stupid! The molluscs!’
‘I beg your pardon. But why ever not?’
‘River pollution: those confounded chemical manures washed off the soil, you know. A regular massacre of the innocents: whole species destroyed every year.’
I shook my head in sympathy.
‘But there’s nothing to prevent you from marrying, is there?’ he persisted.
‘I collect matchboxes,’ I answered, rattling my pockets gloomily. ‘Mine is one of the finest collections in Europe. It would hardly be fair to bring up children among so much incendiary material, would it?’
Presently Uncle Tim, reaching for the menu, said that his rheumatism be damned: with our Dover sole and roast chicken we’d have a bottle of the Club’s famous hock, tacitly reserved for resident members. ‘I know that you appreciate a sound wine, Reginald,’ he said. ‘Not many young men do, with all these confounded mixed drinks about. Gin and vermouth – gin and tonic – gin and bitters: that’s what it’s come to. Even in the Navy. Pollution, I call it!’ He finished enigmatically: ‘Whole species destroyed every year.’
‘Did you ever come across a youngster called Borley?’ he went on. ‘Chap I met once, here at the Club. He wore a floppy hat and an absurd tie like a Frenchman; said he was writing a book. A mind like a corkscrew – went round and round, and in and in, and then pop! out would come something wet. But, for all that, he had a remarkable knowledge of wine; and consented to approve of our hock.’
A waiter tip-toed in, cradling the bottle, and ceremoniously dusted its neck with the brush at the end of an ivory-handled corkscrew. ‘I’ve brought it, fellow-drinker,’ he whispered with a confidential leer.
‘Good Heavens, boy!’ cried Uncle Tim. ‘What’s amiss? Are you taken ill?’
I had dashed out of the Club, and was half-running, half-flying, down the slope to the Fish Market. The evening crowds in Fore Street blocked my way but I swerved and zigzagged through them like an international wing-threequarter.
‘Hey, Reggie, stop!’ a woman shouted almost in my ear.
I handed her off and darted across the narrow street, where I found myself firmly tackled around the waist.
‘For God’s sake, Reggie, what’s the hurry? Have you murdered someone?’
It was Dick Semphill! I stopped struggling and gaped at him. ‘Come into this café and tell Alice and me what’s happened.’
I followed him in, still gaping, and sat down. ‘What on earth are you doing in Brixham?’ I asked, when I found my voice.
‘The regatta, of course,’ Alice answered.
‘But why aren’t you up in Lowestoft?’
‘That’s not till next month. We’ve been here since Friday. Psyche’s not distinguished herself yet, but there’s still hope.’
‘Psyche? But she can’t possibly have sailed from Suffolk in the time!’
‘I don’t know what you’re driving at. She’s not been in the Broads since last year. You’re coming up there next month – at least we hope you are – and we’re going to have a wonderful time. By the way, you haven’t yet told us whether Oulton Broad on the fifteenth suits you.’
‘Where’s Bunny?’
‘At school in Somerset. Murdoch will collect him when he breaks up.’
‘Dick – Alice, I believe I’m going off my head.’ I told them the whole story from the beginning, even making a clean breast of the matchbox business. They both looked thoroughly uncomfortable when I had finished.
Alice said: ‘Obviously, it was a dream, but I can’t make out exactly at what point it began and ended. Listen: I’ll ring up the Yacht Club and find out if your Uncle Tim’s there.’
The ’phone was close to our table. Presently I heard her say: ‘You’re sure? Not since last Tuesday? Laid up with rheumatism? Oh, I’m so sorry. No, no message. Thanks very much.’
She put back the receiver. ‘It’s not so bad, Reggie,’ she said. ‘You haven’t let your uncle down. As a matter of fact, they don’t serve meals at the Yacht Club; and the only cellar there is the Commodore’s personal bottle they keep under the counter. So your dream didn’
t end until Dick woke you up a moment ago. It was a bit more than a dream, of course; a sort of sleep-walk, probably due to worrying about that chap Borley. Lucky we met you. Do you mind turning out your pockets, Reggie, dear? That may give us a clue to how long you’ve been away from your flat.’
I obeyed dazedly. Out came eight matchboxes of different sorts, seven pencils and, among other odds and ends, the return half of a railway ticket from Paddington, and an unposted letter to Alice herself, written from my flat and confirming the Oulton Broad rendezvous.
‘You came down here only this afternoon,’ she said, showing me the date on the ticket.
There was also a bulky envelope containing all the documents concerned with my winding-up of Borley’s affairs. Alice ran through them. ‘I see you duly delivered the wine to the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College,’ she said. ‘And here’s the itemized bill for the funeral at Kirtlington Parish Church. Oh, and a note from Squadron-leader Borley of Banbury, saying that if you’d like any souvenir from his cousin’s effects before the auctioneer disposes of them, you’re very welcome, but will you please let him know as soon as possible. He wrote on Thursday; I don’t suppose you’ve answered him yet. Hullo, here’s a photostat of the will itself! What beastly wriggly writing! Yes, it’s witnessed by –’
Dick had kept quiet all this time. Now he grabbed the will and read it. ‘It’s all right, Reggie,’ he said. ‘You’ve not gone nuts, and we won’t even have to get you psycho-analysed. You’ve merely been haunted – by a ghost which it ought to be easy enough to lay.’ Then he burst out: ‘You dolt, why didn’t you take the trouble to find out whether your friend Borley was a Protestant or a Catholic?’
‘I did take a great deal of trouble, but nobody knew. Even the College couldn’t tell me, so I followed the line of least resistance and had him buried C. of E.’
‘Exactly. That’s what all the trouble’s been about ! You see now why in your dream he called you a damned thief?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Read the will again. Read it aloud!’
I read:
I appoint Reginald Massie to be my executor… the Better Part of my Cellar (Bins A to J) are for the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford. The Worser Part (Bins K to T) are for Mr Reginald Massie…
‘Not “for Mr Reginald Massie,” idiot; if he’d meant you he’d have written “the said Reginald Massie.” It’s “for the Requisite Masses”! Masses for his soul’s repose, don’t you see?’
The exhumation was not easy to wangle, hut I got it fixed up in the end. Then I handed over the wine to the St Aloysius people at Oxford and they agreed to do the rest. And on Alice’s insistence, I wrote to Squadron-leader Borley, asking for the corkscrew as a keepsake. Since he sent it I haven’t pocketed a single matchbox or pencil – so far as I know, that is…
School Life in Majorca 1955
DEARMRS HAMPSTEAD-HENDON:
Mother asks me to answer about schools for your children when you come to see us in Majorca, because they are the same age as Richard and me.
First we lived in a village called Binijiny where they do nothing but grow tomatoes. I and Richard were sent to the Franciscan nuns, and I looked after him until he was old enough to do up his own buttons. Then he went to the State school because the Bishop won’t let girls and bigger boys learn together, although at Binijiny there were only ten boys in the boys’ school and only four girls in the girls’ school. The Franciscans had the other eight girls, mostly with baby brothers. Richard’s headmaster got 800 pesetas a month, not quite £2 a week, which he couldn’t live on. So he spent his school hours at home translating William Shakespeare into Spanish; but as he knew no English, he translated a French translation. He had learned French when he was a waiter-boy in a Marseilles Economical Restaurant which his uncle had; he didn’t like the life because his uncle used to buy the left-overs in the market, stinky fish and rotten vegetables, and say: ‘We must show our clients an example by eating no better than they do.’ That’s how he came to be a schoolmaster.
You can see the Inspector’s car coming up to the Binijiny mountain from two kilometres away, and it always stops halfway to cool down the radiator; so Jaime Frau, the boy who knew the lessons best, used to teach the little boys, and Juan Grau, the boy who knew least, kept watch from the Calvary outside. The Master said: ‘This is good training for your careers, if you don’t like growing tomatoes. Jaime can be a schoolmaster like me and Juan can be a guardia like his father.’ Juan never missed the car and when it arrived the Master had rushed from his house to the school and was busy giving a lecture on the glorious days of Philip II – which is where history really stops in the school books until it starts again with Franco and the glorious liberation of the Patria. So the Inspector who was a Madrileño had a lovely arroz paella at the Fonda, and lots of wine, and then lots of licores, and a cigar, and said that Binijiny had the best school in his district. Once he sent for ten ensaimadas, which are a sort of very light sugar bun in the shape of a whirligig, and said: ‘Now, my little friends, see which of you can eat the quickest. This will be a useful lesson to you in this island of bandits.’ When Juan Grau won easily, the Inspector shouted ‘Olé!’ and then grabbed Richard’s ensaimada and asked: ‘What is wrong with you, little English boy, are you ill? You have taken only one bite.’ Richard said: ‘No, sir! But we English can’t eat so fast as you Spaniards.’ Then the Inspector laughed and swallowed the ensaimada himself at one gulp. Then he made Richard kneel down with his arms stretched out like the penitents on Holy Thursday and said: ‘Stay like that until you have given me back Gibraltar.’
Mother kept me with the Franciscans, because at the Girls’ State School there was too much religion and also politics. One day the Señorita of the Girls’ School saw me sitting on the convent steps eating my lunch, and said in a loud voice that all Protestants will go to Hell and burn for ever. But Sor Juana came out and told the Señorita that I was top of the class in Sacred History. At the back of our arithmetic book which we had to use was the Spanish eagle holding the Falangist arrows in its claws, and that day Sor Juana told the little ones: ‘That’s the Demonio who comes for naughty children.’ In Spanish schools one learns everything off by heart and chants it, and nobody explains what anything means, and nobody cares. Mother paid the nuns fifty pesetas a term for Richard and me, and they were very contented. We talked Majorcan in the playground. It is an easy language, a sort of Italianish French, but one has to shout it or they think you are ill and want to give you a purge.
Two years ago we moved to Palma, which is a large city, and were sent to State schools near our flat. They never opened our windows and I had sixty in my class, mostly poor girls. There was no fireplace but the room soon warmed up even when there was snow on the mountains, and we sat three girls to every desk made for two. My Señorita was very sweet, but I got fleas and sore throats. One day, when a steamroller passed, a window pane fell out and broke; and it never got mended, which was a good thing, of course. Richard’s boys in the school next door were lucky to have a playground where they played bullfights and ‘hit me harder’; we girls had to stay at our desks (taking turns to go to the retrete) and embroider. He got into trouble because his friends caught the steamroller in a booby-trap and burst the water-main, so that the whole suburb was without water for a month. And he learned to throw stones at cars and insult policemen.
Mother took us both away and now we go to the two best schools in the Island. Mine is a convent, and we wear sailor suits and learn French and I am actually allowed out early to learn ballet – because my ballet teacher is a Catholic refugiada from the Russians – but I have to be very industrious to make up. One gets ribbons and coloured scarves to wear for being that, and now I am so dressed up that the girls nickname me ‘The Capitán General of the Baleares’. Richard’s new headmaster is a priest who knows Piccadilly in London and says: ‘To everyone his own religion!’ and asked Mother about Richard’s psychology before he went. He
built the school on an English plan with windows that go up and down, and lavatories with water; and he gives gymnastics and basket-ball. There’s an old grey cockatoo who knows the whole Grado Elemental book off by heart, and a huge black dog who wanders in and out of the classrooms. Mother pays a lot for us – more than £3 a month each, including school dinners and school books; but we are supposed to make valuable friendships with the daughters and sons of rich businessmen. The playground language is Spanish, because the rich businessmen don’t like to have their children mistaken for ordinary Majorcans, even though they are. I think your children would be happy in our schools and soon learn Spanish, but they might not like having to eat bread and oil rubbed with garlic at dinner. We are accustomed to it; but not to the garbanzo soup, which is filthy. When it comes round I ask the girls at my table: ‘Does anyone know the third person plural past definite tense of the verb avoir?’ And they shout it out, and it sounds like everyone being sick, and the nun gets cross.
Love from Margaret
P.S. I enclose the Bulletin of St Modesto of Bobbio’s College in case you are interested.
Bulletin of the College of St Modesto of Bobbio No. 119 Autumn 1955
THE COLLEGE, in its stony immobility, gives signs of awakening life. Somnolent, it casts off the lethargy of a long summer siesta, and makes ready to receive you, dearest young collegians, to its throbbing bosom… At last it is the first week of October, and the end of our annual course in June becomes a retrospect of centuries. The piles of exuberant text-books impatiently await the caress of your industrious hands, while over the now no longer silent cloisters and the already noisy classroom broods the benign and gentle spirit of our illustrious Patron, the incomparable Saint Modesto of Bobbio.
So to work, my friends !
If you are a student and are made to study, this is no sort of injury. Far contrariwise. Learning and the results of learning are absolutely necessary for a man of superior station. If you study with all your forces you will amass a vast capital, on the interest of which you will one day be able to live in voluptuous ease. A student who abandons himself to beachcombing and the gipsy life, prejudices not only himself but his future sons and grandsons, and educated society in general.